When I was in grad school at the University of Maryland, the women’s basketball team won the national championship.

I happened to be basically working full-time reporting for our campus news station that semester, and given my interest in sports was assigned to cover all things Lady Terps.

When the team made the Final Four in Boston, my roommate Jon and I were pretty close to heading up to cover the event. All we had to do was get media passes so we could get inside the arena, and we would have been in a car to Massachusetts. Well, the NCAA has some ridiculous procedures, and after hours and hours of making phone calls we figured out it wasn’t going to happen.

So I did the next best thing, and found an on-campus viewing party that was being held in the movie theater inside the student center. It ended up being probably the best story I did all semester, and though you don’t see it in this video, was followed by my sprinting downtown to cover the resulting riots.

Since I anchored the show this was in, it doesn’t have the “in College Park, CJH, Maryland Newsline” at the end. I mentioned the prospect of this team turning into a dynasty since all five starters returned the following year. Well, while they remained competitive, things didn’t turn out so well. The next three years went like this:

-Lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament
-Lost in the Elite Eight
-Lost in the Elite Eight

At least 2006 was fun.